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readme-not-yossarian

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ENOSUCHBLOG

Programming, philosophy, pedaling.

Jul 16, 2026 Tags: ai, oss

Borat saying "not"

(Thanks to Facundo Tuesca for the name inspiration).

If you’re like me, you spend a lot of your working day (and a good chunk of your personal time) reading code online. Increasingly, that means accidentally reading a lot of “slop” 1.

Personally, slop isn’t annoying per se 2: it’s okay for personal software 3, for example, to be slop. What makes slop annoying is the feeling of being bait-and-switched: much like the written word, I want to be informed 4 before I spend my human attention on machine outputs.

I’m a big believer in giving people a way to express honest intentions. For example, I do sometimes want to drop some slop on the Internet (to save for myself later, or for others to reuse without reading), but I don’t want to mislead people about the intent or effort behind it.

So: what if we gave people a way to express their honest intentions with slop? We use README files to tell users where to start when reading a project; I think we should have a READMENOT 5 file that users (or their agents) can add to their projects when they’re slopping it up. The presence of that file would serve as an unambigous warning that the code within the project is unsuitable for unwitting human comprehension 6.

A READMENOT could contain anything, but it seems to me like a good default would be a short human-friendly explanation of why the project shouldn’t be read. For example:

Warning!

You're reading a project that isn't intended for direct human consumption.
You may wish to use an LLM or another tool to interact automatically with
this project.

Discussions: Mastodon Bluesky Reddit

It’s also worth noting that LLMs are getting better; 2026’s slop is not 2025’s slop. That makes it hard to grant “slop” as a static qualifier; this post reflects reality in July 2026.

  1. What is or isn’t “slop” in the context of programming is currently a matter of energetic (and sometimes emotionally charged) debate. I personally draw the line with either of two sufficient qualities: to me, a codebase is slop if it either (1) is developed primarily without human supervision, or (2) reflects a fundamental lack of operator understanding. These are qualities sometimes occur at the same time, but either suffices. ↩︎

  2. I personally think about slop like generated code: it’s not annoying for generated code to exist, but it is annoying to find yourself reading it because it lacks the appropriate @generated (or whatever) marker. ↩︎

  3. Meaning software that solves a personal problem, is bespoke, is single-use or “disposable,” &c. ↩︎

  4. I often choose to read machine-generated things. Being able to make an informed decision to do so is what matters to me. ↩︎

  5. I don’t really care what this file is named, or that it’s a file at all: any kind of consistent marker would suffice. But calling it READMENOT is funny, so that’s what we’re going with for this post. ↩︎

  6. There are lots of good reasons to still read slop as a human, not least of which is performing security research. The idea behind READMENOT not to tell you to never read a codebase, only to inform you about you what might expect to see if you do decide to read it. ↩︎